There are loads of incredible games on mobile. You just have to know what to look for otherwise looking at any kind of Appstore or Google Play chart you are, as you say, swamped by F2P, microtransaction stuff. Some games do it better than others, but on the whole I prefer a pay once situation. But there really are so many games worth looking at on mobile.

My brothers got me a PlayStation Classic for my birthday last week, and I’m very happy with it so far! I’ve got it running on a small TV in my study (sharing HDMI and power with my C64 Mini), and Super Puzzle Fighter 2, Destruction Derby, Twisted Metal and Ridge Racer - which are all I’ve put serious time into so far - are still great fun and look fine. Slo-mo Tekken 3 is really not good though! I’m still glad I cancelled my pre-order before it came out as there’s probably not enough I’ll keep playing long term (unhacked, at least), but at the current price I’ll get my (their) money’s worth out of it from the games above alone.

Cuphead on Switch is telling me I’m at 50% completion. I’m playing it at every opportunity, and reckon every level is taking me 50-100 goes to complete, so progress is very slow but progress all the same! Also been flitting between Castlevanias on the new Konami collection on Switch. I’ve had a couple of hours having a quick go on all of them now, and I reckon I’ll jump into Kid Dracula properly first - never played it before and first impressions are mighty fine!

At the end of Rage 2 story which as a narrative is awful but the core gameplay gets better the more you unlock stuff

Very short and I've done alot of the side stuff. Once you get the gyrocopter the overworld becomes sort of trivial. The core combat grows the more you unlock the many abilities, perks and upgrades and I've enjoyed it a lot but overall I think it needs to kick off faster. A lot of the game puts a halt to the gameplay and it only becomes more irksome

I've been periodically popping back in to Kingdoms of Amalur, but I have to admit my enthusiasm for it has kind of fizzled out. Today was actually the first time I played it since playing through all of The Witcher 2. I think my fears about how it may have aged turned out to be true, outside of the base feel of the combat at least. That's still cool, but everything else around it feels like it has been outdone several times over by now.

The story isn't really interesting in any meaningful way. The lore and setting is very run of the mill and unoriginal, which is kind of odd considering how much effort they allegedly put in to developing that with this game. All of the characters are really bland, and it would even be a stretch to call them "one note", since that would require the characters actually have one thing distinguishing about them. Instead they have pretty much zero personality and only ever talk about the plot, or at most their role within the hierarchy they inhabit. They're pretty emotionless. And the overarching plot that they're so concerned with is very standard fare and unsurprising. Ending a war where the bad guy is using some arcane forbidden magic that only you as the chosen one with the power to change fate can stop. There is perhaps some potential there to explore questions about free will, but instead the game basically uses it to just pull the same plot point of "X event was supposed to go badly, but it didn't because you were there", and as a reason to let you change your character class whenever you want. As if the hero saving the day is somehow subversive in any way.

The world also lacks atmosphere, unfortunately. Although this one is a bit more frustratingly close to being good. Despite the graphical fidelity be pretty aged these days, the art design in the areas nearer the start of the game is still pretty solid. You start off with lots of lush forests full of verdant and exotic plant life, with a sprinkling magical effects to bring it to life. Then later on you move out on to some open grassy plains that manage to create a feeling of serene expansiveness, dotted with dramatic geological structures to break things up and give the landscape a sense of personality. But after that you start moving in to more barren rocky areas, and it doesn't hold up well. There isn't much detail to the terrain, and it doesn't feel like it has much character. Just a lot of red rock with so little detail to it that it's hard not to see it as a haphazard arrangement of polygons and textures. And from what I remember of the later areas of the game, that only gets worse, with the red rock giving way to drab grey. But the thing that really lets down the sense of atmosphere is the sound design. Even in the areas which look nice, there is pretty much no background soundscape. It makes it really hard to feel like it's a real place when everywhere you go feels like it's just an image. Like your character isn't really there, their footsteps silent, with no ambient noises going on. This extends to the soundtrack as well, which is perhaps the most frustrating part of it, because it's actually excellent (composed by Grant Kirkhope no less) but you hardly ever hear it. You only hear these ambient mood pieces for the first few minutes after entering a zone, and only sometimes. It highlights the transition to absolute silence pretty starkly as well. While music does always play during combat, it's easily the least evocative part of the soundtrack. But they could have maybe got away with a lack of ambient sound effects if they just used the music the game already has a bit more frequently.

Although this thing about sound effects does remind me of something I noticed lately that I was going to mention in a previous post. I've noticed that one of the best things a game can do to give itself a sense of atmosphere, that is rarely taken advantage of, is to make an effort to portray wind. Rime does this fairly well, depending on the level you're in. As does The Witcher 3, which is something I was reminded of lately, as after finishing 2 I stuck 3 back on for a little bit, as it was on my mind so much. Not that I didn't notice it before, but it really struck me again playing it recently, how rich the atmosphere of that game is, and how much of it comes from a sense of the howling wind, as Geralt would put it. On top of that, it's also been something I really appreciate in Dragon's Dogma, which happens to be a game I was weighing up Witcher 2 against before I decided on that. DD is a pretty sparse looking game, that was even a bit rough for the time it came out. Yet having the game be set in a windswept coastal area, and really trying hard to sell that visually, helped make up for those shortcomings and gave it a really rich sense of place.

But back to KoA. I've got some misgivings about the gameplay too, despite that being easily the best part of this game. I still enjoy the combat, but I'm having a bit of a tough time trying to branch out a bit on this playthrough. I wanted to make a concerted effort to not go for the same weapon types as I did when playing this originally. With how good the combat does feel, and how long you're going to be doing that in this game, I felt like trying out something different, instead of falling back on my usual style of variously sized swords. The problem is that everything I tried turns out to be not that great after all. The faeblades, which are exotic double-bladed dagger things, are far too slow, and have a somewhat floaty feel to them. They're supposed to be the second fastest weapons after normal daggers, yet the wind-up for a lot of their attacks feels agonisingly long, leaving you open for far too long. And the payoff isn't worth it either, as they have pretty awful DPS. I also tried the normal daggers, and while they feel more quick and responsive, the damage on them is also pretty bad. But the thing that really killed them for me is that they have this one attack that I found to be pretty painful to look at. It's a move where you dash through an enemy several times at lightning speed, but for some reason the game decides to flash up a single white frame on the moment you hit them. I don't tend find visual effects for combat in games distracting, but that one I just felt physically uncomfortable to look at, to the point where I couldn't take it more than a few times in a row. It doesn't even look interesting. It doesn't have any sense of style to it, it's just flashing the screen blank white. (You can see it at about the 1:10 minute mark in this video) It feels really artificial and unnecessary. Aside from all that, there's also the issue of just how long it takes to unlock new moves. There is a reasonable variety of things you can do in combat, but it takes forever to flesh things out. If they were to make a sequel to this game (which might actually be possible these days thanks to THQ) they should instead start you off with at least half of the stuff you can do in this game, maybe more, and finish with much more. It doesn't need to be DMC or anything, but for the length this game is, and how much of it is you smacking around enemies, it needs more. It wears itself pretty thin.

What a fantastic game! As I said up thread, outside of the odd go at Arcade Club, I've never sat down to play this but it's bloody brilliant. The handling feels so good, it's so fast and smooth and the reworked music is absolutely sensational. It's visually so SEGA and the atmosphere just makes me happy. Even the Ghost Forest stage is creepy and kooky in a haunted house playful way. It's basically Endorphins: The Game.

Aside from that, I've unlocked X Mode on DaiOuJou Black Label Extra and while it's kind of pointless in a way because your basic shot is hyper shot and your hyper shot is the bullet cancelling hyper from Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu so you can pretty much shred everything, build up your meter, spawn more hypers, go into hyper, cancel everything and point blank bosses then spawn more hypers, it's still awesome. It's basically an excuse to destroy the game and play it as pure power fantasy. Absolutely colossal game, though, and I'm very gradually learning to chain stage one. It's such a precise and difficult game if you're playing for score, almost reminds me of the Ikaruga days, but it's so satisfying when it comes together (for the first twenty seconds).

Yeah given the endless re-releases and inclusion within other games of the original Outrun, its a shame the sequel has never enjoyed the same sort of ubiquity. I love that game (well, series). I've currently got 2006 for the PSP installed on my Vita and it's just such a brilliant arcade racer - as someone who doesn't even enjoy the genre that much (I love driving games, just tend to prefer the more GT or Project Cars type affairs).

I've been playing Fell Seal and it does exactly what it says it does. It's as solid of a tactical rpg as you can get and I'm now starting to mix and match different classes together. While the graphics/animations might be a bit rough, the art style as a whole is colorful and vibrant.
I'm really enjoying this so far, recommend is easily to Final Fantasy Tactics fans.

I wish I bought outrun 2006 when it was still on steam, I had a boxed copy, but now I don't know where that is, and there was me just the other day saying that I don't know why people rebuy games they already own on steam. I'm gonna download a naughty copy, sod it, I bought it, that's probably not too bad a thing to do if you bought it already.
It got taken off because the Ferrari license or something ran out. Bloody daft things like that, isn't it? Like how you can't buy games because they have certain music in them and stuff.
There wasn't much of the game, but it was just such easy going fun drifting around, it didn't matter, you just played it again and again.

I've got really bad anxiety and everyone's away on holiday, I can't go because I'm too scared and I'm looking after the dog and she was barking really loud and there was this long weird noise that went on for ages and the vase that's at the top of stairs was lying like it was about to slide down the stairs.
I thought maybe a cat had got in, my dog must have knocked it with her big hairy arse on the way up the stairs and it's just wobbled for ages (the vase) and then landed against the banister and slowly slid down to just stop lying like it was going to slide down the stairs but it just stayed there. It was the weirdest thing.
I've been around checking all the cupboards for goblins.
Brrr, she ran downstairs and hid in the corner, and now she's just in my lap constantly, we'll both be sleeping under the bed tonight with something propped up against the door, nervously humming the ghostbusters theme.
I took her into the garden and she likes chewing stones, so I thought she was just doing that and then she spat out this big fucking lump of glass! Dear god.

Fuck it, I'm not meant to but I'm having some sweet berry wine, there's no other way through this.

Sounds like a rough one, fella. I'd recommend a bit of Studio Ghibli, Laputa or something. Actually, Porco Rosso is a good film for a wobbly Sunday. It's about a pilot pig swooping around in a red plane over the Mediterranean. Good wholesome stuff. Or OutRun 2006, even! Actually, maybe there's a half decent thread on 'comfort games'.

I really enjoyed Kingdoms of Amalur, from what I played of it... which was about 30 hours into the single player campaign.

at that point it really started to hit home that it was meant to be an MMORPG and was cut down to a single player due to certain restraints.

Great game, but could have been so much better.

There's a whole backstory around nearly bankrupting a state in the US that I am aware of but won't go into detail here!

Speaking of MMORPGs.... This week I am mostly playing WoW! It's been many years since I touched it but the latest cinematic, with Saurfang hunting down Thrall for a chat.... well, it's just great, if one good thing was to come out of the sadly failed movie, is that the cinematics clearly have been influenced by it.... A great little 4 minutes and one that has got me totally back into the game after many years away.

I wish there had been a Fable 4, hope the series gets revived at some point. With this Nintendo/MS sort of team up being thrown around at the moment imagine Fable 1-3 trilogy getting a Switch release. I don't buy many games day one but I'd be camped on the doorstep for that! Would be nice to revisit 3 after all these years too and see if I can get in to it. But Fable 2 on a handheld would make my year.

Giving me a reason to play this other than to get hammered by other players was a masterstroke from Nintendo - I worked on unlocking the Game Boy theme which was a lot of fun, and it made me realise how good the game is too - I'm definitely going to have a bash now and again. Best I came was 11th or something in the run of games, it was fun.

I wish there had been a Fable 4, hope the series gets revived at some point.

I think we might see something this e3. It’s been an open secret for a while now that playground are probably working on it. (Or something very similar at least, if it turns out not to actually be a Fable game)

at that point it really started to hit home that it was meant to be an MMORPG and was cut down to a single player due to certain restraints.

Great game, but could have been so much better.

There's a whole backstory around nearly bankrupting a state in the US that I am aware of but won't go into detail here!

I've looked in to the story of the game too, and it's certainly interesting stuff. Although it's actually not true that this game was supposed to be an MMO. What actually happened was that 38 Studios created the IP with the intention of creating an MMO that never came out. Probably why they put all that effort in to building the lore. But the project ran in to trouble and was taking a long time, so they decided they wanted to put out something else first to introduce the IP and get some more money rolling in. So they found Big Huge Games, who had already started work on what would become Reckoning, and then decided to re-tool it to become part of the KoA IP. The cancelled MMO was being created under the code name of Project Conpernicus, and a little bit of footage of it leaked out once 38 Studios went bankrupt.

Reckoning does have something of a "single player MMO" feel to it though. While the combat is completely different, and something that was probably impossible to have done in an MMO at the time, the world structure and quest design do feel kind of MMO-ish. The aesthetic too perhaps.

Spent a bit of time with Hades this morning, the early-access roguelite from SuperGiant. At the start I was pretty turned off by the aesthetic, and Greek mythology is boooooorrriiing, but it has started to grow on me. I've reached the first area boss, who is completely overwhelming on first sight; time will tell if she gets easier to deal with.

They mix things up reasonably - the doors are labelled, so you can sometimes choose what type of encounter you want next. There is some procedural generation of levels, though they are rather samey - I've done about 12 runs now and they have all been pretty similar. I've been mostly relying on my ult/special which is an aoe attack, rather than the bow (which I find fiddly) or the sword (dashing in and out is a bit of a pain as there are tonnes of traps around the place).

The big issue for me so far is that it is very hard to recover health once you lose it, though there are rooms with healing fountains and the like which I may be missing (haven't figured out what all the icons on the doors mean yet).

So yeah, it's got upsides and downsides. Definitely getting that 'one more turn' vibe, as the item and ability progression seems to be moving along at a right old clip.

Edit: Oh! The current build sometimes has a bit of screen lag or shuddering/jerkiness seemingly at random, which is a bit offputting. This happens in empty rooms too so it's not down to enemies on screen, though that can be quite hectic at times.

You can turn off the screenshake.
A single screen (but scrolling up and down) single stick deal with dodge and stomp and double jump (hold to float). Some balancing issues, I mean I really worked for my high score and then on my next run I chose the melee guy, my first upgrade was to sacrifice all but three hearts for "something something combo" and then after that I got some decent health upgrades which negated the loss so it was like free superscore and I nearly beat my score in way less time. I mean, I died to a stupid death and didn't quite manage it, but still. Maybe that upgrade should lock you to three hearts so it's a super risky thing to do.

Giving me a reason to play this other than to get hammered by other players was a masterstroke from Nintendo - I worked on unlocking the Game Boy theme which was a lot of fun, and it made me realise how good the game is too - I'm definitely going to have a bash now and again. Best I came was 11th or something in the run of games, it was fun.

Same here, my eldest and I took turns. He got the highest with a 20 something place. I never got above 40! I'm actually pretty decent at normal Tetris but this is really hard!

I wish there had been a Fable 4, hope the series gets revived at some point.

I think we might see something this e3. It’s been an open secret for a while now that playground are probably working on it. (Or something very similar at least, if it turns out not to actually be a Fable game)